I have a few friends that have recently purchased a fifth-gen. iPod. You know the ones that play video that looks awesome? Well, I suspect many of those very same people have DVD’s that they’ve purchased and would like to watch while on the go. That’s made very, very easy with CloneDVD Mobile by SlySoft and your Fair Use rights. You can try it for free for 21 days and then purchase for $39 if you like it (via BoingBoing).
Coleman, if this works well then I am not ashamed to say I love you in public, not that I would have been anyway.
Looks like a good thing for PC people.
On the Mac side, however, I’ve tried two different apps so far: Handbrake and FortyTwo-DVD-VXPlus (worst name ever!). They both will rip a DVD directly to iPod-preferred format. Neither are perfect. It takes like 8 hours or more to rip a movie with either of these. I can deal with that, but the main thing is: videos ripped with FTDVDVXP (not even a short abbreviation!) don’t seem to have perfectly sync’d audio and video. It’s really annoying. And Handbrake is better with sync, but its interface is not nearly as nice and I get little skips/pops in the audio.
Still looking for the ultimate utility for DVD->iPod. I’d really like FTDVDVXP if they would only fix the sync issue. Maybe in a future version.
PS- The main thing I’m using this for is to copy live music DVDs to my iPod. This allows me to listen to the concert in audio mode, or watch in video mode, or listen (in video mode) in the car while Stacie watches the video.